Copyright
Anna StreetISBN
Language
- English
THEMA
- QDTN
- QDHR
- DSB
- DSG
- DD
- QDX
BISAC
- PHI001000
- PHI006000
- PER003100
- HUM029000
- LIT004120
- LIT004150
Keywords
- Comedy
- Post-war Theater
- Arthur Adamov
- Samuel Beckett
- Eugene Ionesco
- Harold Pinter
- N. F. Simpson
Comedy of the Impossible
The Power of Play in Post-War European Drama
- Anna Street (author)
Endorsements
Anna Street's Comedy of the impossible is a beautifully written, academically thorough and ethically engaging book that places comedy at the forefront of philosophical and wider social debates in the last hundred years or so. It convincingly argues that comedy, while historically a neglected and subordinated topic of inquiry, became the paradigmatic object of philosophical interest precisely because of its characteristic feature: comedy keeps demonstrating that the impossible happens all the time. This is a book that boldly moves beyond the accepted theories of what is comical or what makes us laugh and pushes the reader to accept comedy as the very lens through which contemporary social, ethical and political phenomena must be studied in order to understand them properly. This book will not only be of great interest to academics and students in the growing fields of comedy studies and performance philosophy, but also to anyone interested in what makes us modern human beings.
Dr Gregor Moder
University of Ljubljana
Contributors
Anna Street
(author)Anna Street is Senior Lecturer at Le Mans Université, specialized in theater and performance (https://3lam.univ-lemans.fr/fr/les-membres-du-laboratoire/enseignants-chercheurs/street-anna.html). After obtaining undergraduate and master’s degrees in philosophy, she completed a doctorate in Theater Studies from the Sorbonne (2016) and in Comparative Literature from the University of Kent in Canterbury (2017). Focusing particularly on how dramatic genres influenced philosophical writing, her interests lie firmly in the interface between philosophy and performance, confirmed by her activities as a core convenor of the Performance Philosophy network, launched in 2012 and now comprised of 2500 members, an online journal and a book collection (https://www.performancephilosophy.org/about/conveners/). Her co-edited collection Interviews in Performance Philosophy: Crossing and Transfers explores how French Theory was instrumental in developing notions of performativity among Anglo-saxon theorists (Palgrave 2017). Her latest co-edited volume, Genre Transgressions: Dialogues on Tragedy and Comedy (forthcoming Routledge 2023), is a collection of exchanges between artists and academics examining the ongoing relevance of genre distinctions. Over the past ten years, Anna Street has presented her research at 28 different conferences or scientific events spanning eight countries. She has published 15 chapters and articles, notably for the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (JCDE), Sillages critiques, the Performance Philosophy Journal, and Anglia: Journal of English Philology. She has also edited an issue of the JCDE on “Theater & the City” and translated ten books in Les petits Platons, a collection devoted to making philosophy accessible to children.